No every Android phone with the installed app / root kit may have some Kaspersky security product delivering telemetry. This makes those numbers a bit difficult to interpret understand.

I do not believe that both numbers (the 500k and the 6000) can be related and compared. In the end you can only conclude what is written in the text: at least 6000 phones are compromised, with the implicit knowledge that this number may be much higher, possibly in the 500 k range.

An interesting information would be to know how many devices overall are monitored by Kaspersky (from which the 6000 infected device have been identified) and how many of those attempted to install the said app. A further interesting information would be the overall count of active individual devices on the Google Play Store in the time period where the app was available. These information would allow interesting cross comparison and possibly help to understand user behaviour in face of a product identified as potentially harmful.

The information from Kaspersky may also be further biased by the fact that someone with such security products on their phone may have a different level of awareness for such risks as someone who doesn't.

Too bad the USA doesn't have an national agency responsible for information security. Maybe they could re-task that other agency too busy needlessly crawling under terabytes of spam emails and billions of SMS of a single emoji to actually do just that, securing the critical national information.

A post on Slashdot related to the fact that many people lack basic education and/or skills to basic reasoning skills?And over the top linking/citing a buzzfeed post? Are they now directly feeding their facebook wall on/. now?

I wonder what's worse: A few people believing a film is based on a true story when it obviously can't or the fact that this is posted here. I will ponder on that.

I think they just heard me laugh all the way to China. Seriously, most people can't even grasp the concept of risk when think of software and operating systems. How in the world do you expect them to understand those risk?

No. Contrary to some believes, most (as in almost) all jailbrokers have no clue what they do and have no idea of what are the risks involved and how important (or not) they are.

Yes, you are. The you are right to say that the origin of the name comes from a method to produce light with those specific characteristic. But very few to non device still use this method today.

Gas cavity laser, laser diodes, chemical laser, etc. all do not pass in your restricted vision of what a laser ist. But long has been established to call laser a device that creates light with coherent characteristics as did the first early LASERs.

In your world, it would be wrong to call a car a car because there are nor horses in front of it.

And, by the side, the word laser is now in the oxford dictionnary. Not only it has a definition, but also its not (only) an accronym anymore, so uppercase is not called for in general use. Which leads back to your point: someone talking of a laser diode is correct; not someone talking about a LASER diode.

Somehow, I do not believe you...Obviously it seems so important to you and affecting you to the point where you feel the need to post a comment in which you are compelled to state that you are running Debian. Why?

Its as if you either feel threatened or superior... in any case it DOES affect you.

For those bot getting the "joke", GEMA is pretty much the German equivallent of the RIAA in the US.

They are notorious for geoblocking in Germany videos from youtube which contains content under their licensing rights... Even youtube channels from the artists themselves.

The infamous message "this content is blocked because it contains material owned by GEMA" is a nightmare for youtube users in Germany

And this is where this joke becomes insightful. Once you open the markets in the EU and ban geoblocking, how do you deal with this type of geoblocking? Will they address geoblocking only in a commercial transaction (what would actually be much worse for GEMA in the business model they drive) or address geoblocking in all its forms?

Vibrational spectroscopy is non-destructive. You simply observe the vibrational (or translation, or rotation) modes of molecules. Most systems measure what is absorbed (ie. you have an known IR source and measure what of it doesn't get through - assuming the absorbed photons corresponds to vibration modes of the molecule). Although this is an active measurement approach, the energy needs are too long to cause damage to the molecule or samples. But you could go in at higher energy level... this is basically what a microwave oven does, exiting the rotational modes of water molecules. It also work to some extent with reflection, but it will be dependent upon the nature of the sample.

But a vibrating molecule will also emit radiation at wavelength corresponding to the energy of the vibration modes. This enables passive measurement which is not only non-destructive, but also allows measurement without any kind of interaction. Emission IR spectroscopy is used a lot for remote sensing of the atmosphere for example.

So either you are totally passive or only sending a week IR signal which partly gets absorbed and partly transmitted/reflected. A typical IR source for laboratory instruments is a glowbar. That simply a small wire heated to about 800C... it looks a lot like a car cigarette lighter. You won't rip of electrons of your samples with that;)

Thanks for your insights. Still trying to decide whether something like this should go on my wish list;) (see above for my potential uses).

Don't expect to much of it for the first generation / first product. Once you get a few competitors and iterations on the technology, you can have a serious look at it. I'd also wait to see a view "in-depth technical reviews" with labor-based comparison studies. To satisfy your curiosity, if your budget allows it, it will definitely be worth it (assuming it at least work a little). I expect the results at first to feel a little like translating something in some language with google translate and translating it back with bing.

How accurate, exactly, do you think such a device could be? Obviously it's not going to be pulling out the sort of precision of a professional spectrometer. But you mention, for example, being able to identify the signatures of herbicides and pesticides. Do you mean, for example, "This contains imidacloprid", or more like, "This contains a nicotinoid of some variety"?

It's hard to say without having more detailed information on the spectral range, spectral resolution, illumination source, detector type and sensitivity, and, most importantly, the type of spectrometer. From the description, it seems that it is a diffracting spectrometer, but that again comes in different flavours. Long story short, I can only guestimate the performance of it based on my experience designing such devices with the information they provide. Now, some molecular basis have specific signatures even a low resolution device could identify. Because these molecular basis are shared by various different molecules, it may be difficult to do more as to identify a group such as nicotinoids. And for the same reason you will have a lot of false positives.

This is where the apriori information play an important role. If you are looking at an apple, the spectral database-based/cloud-based analysis program knows what to expect and can raise a warning flag if it sees something which might be a nicotinoid, because that's not expected in the spectra of a "clean" apple. The same analysis program will ignore the warning if you say you are analysing a cigarette. This, btw. may also lead to false negative... but with low spectral resolution, I believe that the cloud-based analysis will play a crucial role. And this is actually the most interesting part of this innovation.

How useful do you think it could be on identifying mineral species - say, distinguishing between different zeolites?

I've never saw an IR spectrometer used for mineralogy or metallurgy. I doubt it can provide you with any significant information in those fields. Other factors you cannot see in vibrational spectroscopy play a too large role.

Or, back to food, if given, say, a mango, to get readings of, say, water, sugar (in general, or specific sugars), fat (in general, or specific categories of fats, or specific fats), protein (in general, or specific categories of proteins, or specific common protiens... obviously it's not going to be able to pull out 5 ppb of Some-Complex-Unique-Protein), common vitamins (generally found in dozens of ppm quantity - some more, some less), minerals (likewise), etc?

This is where I believe the advertisement is way to promising and optimistic. I'd occupy your day to do that on a very expensive and high-performance laboratory IR spectrometer. Under laboratory conditions.

Take this example of sugar spectra from the Agilent website. They don't specify it, but that's most likely 4 cm^-1 resolution. You see that it is possible to identify specific sugar compounds, but also that the spectra are quite alike. Now reduce the spectral resolution to something like 128 cm^-1 and you'll have a hard time identifying the exact type of sugar.

There's a reason IR spectroscopy has fallen by the wayside in chemistry - it doesn't give you enough information, and just hasn't kept up with other techniques. It's used for specific tasks, such as monitoring a reaction, but it's not a go-to analysis technique any more.

I couldn't disagree more (although one would say I'm somewhat biased on the applications of IR spectroscopy). First I know no research or production analytic lab without at least one IR spectrometer. In quality insurance they are also used a lot. For in-situ monitoring of reaction, IR spectrometer are generally not appropriate because to slow at sufficient spectral resolution. You can only monitor very slow reactions.

Maybe you are thinking of a specific branch, where other techniques are more appropriate or practical?

And I am surprised by the statement that vibrational spectroscopy doesn't give you enough information. Maybe not enough for a specific task such as identifying elementary elements, but you get a lot of information on the molecular structure of a compound. With gasses you can also do very precise quantitative analysis. I think only NMR spectroscopy will give your more information on the molecular structure and an NMR certainly does not fit in the palm of the hand.

You will not be able to determine raw elements with a NIR spectrometer. With a NIR-LWIR spectrometer, you can only identify molecular compounds, because what you are observing is actually the vibration modes of the molecules. In this spectral range, you will have a lot of signature for organic compounds. So you may be able determine if something is made of plastic. Determining the kind is trickier because most plastics are actually very similar and would require a device with higher spectral resolution to make such a determination.

For elementary elements (iron, copper, gold, etc.), you can forget it. That device will not help you.